ABSTRACT
Ontological substantialism influences a wide swath of IR schools of thought, including neorealism, neoliberalism, post-Marxism and even some versions of constructivism and post-modernism. Ontological substantialism has atomistic and structural versions. Atomistic versions of ontological substantialism explain what happens based upon entities’ attributes, while structural versions do so by positing organizing principles of the whole. Meanwhile, idealist versions of substantialist positions portray the power of ideas along the lines of Newtonian causal models as quantifiable relations among self-contained entities. All of these positions are methodologically conservative as they limit political imagination.
